Some does. There is a lot of different brands and companies that distribute it. I would assume the pros use top of the line sprays. It's rediculous that its a banned substance anyway. It helps you heal from injuries and has no known bad side-effects.

"im saying to myself should i do it should i not. I crossed the goaline and hey...fuck it" Desmond Howard on his Heisman pose

Red Deer Antler Velvet is something that Asian medicine has known about for a very long time, well over 2000 years, but only lately has the Western world caught on to. Taken from mature male Red Deer, this substance is processed and used in both traditional Chinese medicine and in Western culture as a nutritional supplement. In the west it is called “deer antler spray” or deer antler velvet. No matter what the name, it is harvested from populations of Red Deer in New Zealand. These farmed deer are known to be disease free and thus provide the best quality antler velvet.

Although it has been known to work for centuries, although only in the last thirty years has science uncovered why. The active ingredient in this product is a very effective growth hormone that has great impact on the human body. While it can be taken in a powdered form, via pill or in a drink, the most popular form is in a spray. This spray is known as red deer antler spray and has a fat based delivery system that claims to deliver the hormone into the bloodstream faster and have more of the hormone where it will do the most good for longer then a pill or powder can.

This is a product made from Red Deer farmed in New Zealand. Male Red Deer produce antlers each year, and these antlers are removed from the animal while they are still “velvet” covered to keep the males from injuring each other. This material can be taken from the deer just like a fingernail can be removed by certificated farmers and Veterinarians, leaving the animal unharmed. Because antlers grow at an astounding speed, the entire harvest takes just a few weeks. After removal the velvet deer antler is freeze dried and processed into various forms from powders and pills to sprays.

Deer antler spray has been linked to a number of hormones that are proven to have positive health benefits. The most important is IGF-1. IGF-1, or Insulin-like Growth Factor-1, is the star hormone here. This performance enhancing chemical is naturally made by the body, and thus is hard to detect in standard dope-testing. It is a byproduct of HGH in the body. And where HGH is heavily controlled, getting IGF-1 into the blood through the use of these sprays is legal. It has been proven that IGF-1 helps with muscle development and performance. It does this by transporting energy and building blocks that muscles need. More being delivered to the muscle cells mean they can work faster at healing or growing.

The side effect of this is that by using deer antler spray one can improve athletic performance, simulate the metabolism, improve the overall condition of the heart, and help fight off colds and flu. By allowing the body to burn off more stored sugars and require the burning of fat stores to fuel increased muscle use, this spray can do a lot in way of rejuvenation on the body. This may help with nerve damage repair as well. Deer Antler spray has IGF II, NGF, TGF-B, EGF, FGF, and a score of other growth factors, in addition to a wide range of proteins as well.

This is a very popular nutritional supplement. It is also nearly impossible to detect if it is being used. This is one reason why such sport figures like Bengals safety Roy Williams feel as though they can come right out and admit using deer antler spray on a regular basis. Mr. Williams has never come up positive on a doping test, so even though IGF-1 is a banned substance in the NFL, there is no way that a urine- based test can detect it. Coaches (like Hue Jackson), athletes (yep even the legendary Ray Lewis), who knows who else, all use this spray, and for all we know, really, there’s little harm in it.

Fact is, deer antler spray is based in medicine used in Asia for centuries. The spray is natural, discrete, effective, and for the most part clean to use. Since it is something that naturally occurs in the body it cannot be detected by standard tests. There appears to be limited long term risks involved in using it, although there are some well documented benefits to it. While it might not be for everyone, deer antler spray does have positive points for those who do need it, and increasingly many people will find they do need it.

Has it been proven to work in the form of deer antler spray?(can it be absorbed and utilized through the skin? Through the Gi tract?) or would it need to be injected to the bloodstream to have an actual effect?

I made the mistake of clicking on that link. Is that in English? I feel small and dumb. I have both an engineering (from UM) and a law degree, and I felt insignificant and unworthy to read that medical-science stuff. Wow.

Can someone translate it? What's it mean?

It's Sci Time -- Science, culture and common sense: http://itsscitime.wordpress.com

would eventually allow me to shine on an internet message board someday. That day has arrived.

It's just an abstract and not a full paper, so there's not much to it other than to say that the lab added the gene for IGF protein to skeletal muscle cells and then measured those cells for growth activity using a standard method (it's indirect-- they look for activity at a "transcription factor" called GATA-2 which ordinarily won't get turned from DNA into RNA, so when they see lots of it, they know the muscle cell is turned on).

So "localized IGF transgene expression sustains hypertrophy and regeneration in senescent skeletal muscle" is just a way of saying "we made IGF just in this one type of non-growing muscle cell and voila, it started getting pumped up like Popeye eating spinach."

Given that they noted using "transgenic embryos," it's a good bet this was done in mice. Yes, you probably guessed what that means. Mice are now strong enough to take over the world.

I only have my Bs in biology so my experience with research is limited... What are your experiences with transgenic vs just adding the substance? Ie. if the researchers in the study above had added IgF-1 rather than having it expressed as a gene, would the results have been different?

Edit- biology, not bology. Autocorrect never works when u wish it would.

that IGF-1 or HGH or other substances will increase lean muscle. Your point about bioavailability is spot on. The amount of the hormone and it's method of administration (and absorption) is what matters.

1. How much IGF1 is in what you are buying. These kind of products generally don't have great quality control and are mostly "fillers" (inert substances).
2. How will the drug be applied. A spray could work if formulated correctly to penetrate the superficial tissues (epidermis and dermis) but would have a mostly local effect on the underlying skeletal muscle. A cream or ointment would probably work better because of increased contact time. An oral formulation could also work but you'd need a bigger concentration and have to worry about first pass metabolism.

So, yeah, it could work but only if formulated and applied correctly and used in conjunction with a strength training program.

Most likely, simple exogenous (i.e., free-form protein just kinda dumped on the cells) addition of IGF-1 would give you some measurable effect on a simple in vitro cell-culture assay, assuming the muscle cells have a surface receptor for the stuff.

But in the mouse model they're using in the paper, you can't really pump IGF into the mouse for that long, and even if you did, you could get effects all over the organism depending on bioavailability, not just the muscle. What they did was much cleaner and fancy: put the gene for the expression into the embryo under the control of a muscle cell promoter, so it only turns on in muscle cells and you can isolate the effect. That's more of a gold-standard approach; the quick-and-dirty proof-of-concept would be what you describe, just feeding the stuff to the cells.

I did a lot of research in on skeletal muscle during undergrad. If your'e curious, Ron Allen at Arizona has done quite a bit of work on the effects of growth factors on skeletal muscle growth and development. Here are two more relevant abstracts:

Different types of science have different communication standards. In a journal like Nature Genetics, an author isn't writing to their mom, they are writing to another top expert in their own field. What pray tell makes you think a scientist didn't write this?

You think "deerantlerspray.org" is run by the journal Nature Genetics?

The Nature group of journals are some of the highest impact-factor journals in the world. See that abstract cited a few posts down? (or up, depending on your settings) Read that abstract. That's written by a qualified scientist in a Nature journal.

How about the most painfully obvious stupidity in the whole thing-- that deer antler spray "can't be detected" because it is naturally occuring in the body. In whose body? Deer? If you have a non-human protein floating around in a human, it's not that hard to detect it, assuming the excretory or immune system hasn't cleared it already as a protein from a foreign animal that is not known for homogeneity to humans and wouldn't have a cognate cellular receptor in a human, much less one localized to myocytes (muscle cells).

"An Alabama official told SI that S.W.A.T.S. had been sent two cease-and-desist letters by the program, and Auburn and LSU have sent similar letters -- letters the company displays in its offices -- after similar run-ins with the company."

Why do I have this image of this company's sales training being something out of Mel Brooks' "History Of The World: Part I"?

It's my understanding that it will amount to nothing because there isn't really anything to pursue. The university has been pro-active about keeping these guys away from their players, so there's no institutional issue. And the players involved, as I understand it, aren't on-field contributors, plus we're talking about snake oil remedies like deer antler (yes, contains small amounts of IGF-1, but tiny amounts that would do nothing even at 100x the dosages given to the players), light beams, and holographic stickers.

Aside from the total weirdness aspect, there really isn't anything to see here from a competitive standpoint. At least that's what I've gathered from reports that actually follow up with who did what and what these things supposedly do.

"...I wouldn't be so sure those women were innocent. The children are obviously innocent - if they are less than five."

"The North Korean soccer association attempted to cover its ass by claiming that its deered up athletes were undergoing a traditional Korean treatment given to people after they are struck by lightning. Yes, they expected FIFA officials to believe that five members of the team were simultaneously struck by lightning and had to receive treatment that just happened to have a performance enhancing side effect."

If aOSU gets wind of this, they might start mistakenly spraying themselves with deer urine. If their basketball team ever plays Fairfield Unviersity (Stags) the result would be hysterical/banned in 12 countries. Mmmmm, doe urine.